Tim Parks’s latest novel opens in the forests of the South Tyrol, where a group of white-water enthusiasts are taking a kayaking holiday. The river is overflowing with melt water from a...
Rilke: The Apple Orchard Come just after the sun has gone down, watch This deepening of green in the evening sward: Is it not as if we’d long since garnered And stored within ourselves a...
When I grew up, I wanted to work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Partly because of the name: an intriguing and exciting combination of the exotic and the everyday, the hi-tech and the homely,...
My Future – waiting for me somewhere out of sight past the betting shop and the Nationwide where buses stop to shiver in the middle of the night – doesn’t for a moment doubt...
When we discuss novels, there is nothing easier or harder to talk about than characterisation. Nothing easier, in that unprofessional readers’ expressions of interest or aversion so often...
Is anybody listening? This isn’t a question that detains most eminent Western writers of fiction, whose able conjurings of hot-air balloon disasters relived in appalled slow motion, or of...
In 1980, when she was in her late thirties, Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping. Her way of seeing things seemed to have sprung from nowhere and was like no one...
All of Kazuo Ishiguro’s six novels are first-person narratives. For the most part the voices of these narrators are quiet, civilised, rather formal. This is so whether the speaker is the...
Insomnia Everywhere it’s raining except here where the mosquitoes thrive and the car alarms wail at each other all through the dog-moaning night, and just before dawn that smell of onions...
During my last reservist stint, in Ama Keng, that unmistakeable waft: like garbage and onions and liquid petroleum gas all mixed in one. We jerked our helmeted heads upward, and saw the spiky...
He was world-weary from the beginning. Nowhere was safe. Before he was 25 he declared New York to be a ‘giant snake pit’, Los Angeles to be ‘quel hole’. Naples was...
‘… metals talking among themselves, metals that first meet above the earth …’Adam Zagajewski, Another BeautyI thought about it walking home.One of those relentlessly...
In which all outstanding problems of art history are settled to everyone’s satisfaction. What mattered more for Manet and Monet, That Manet had money or Monet had manners? Mattered to what,...
The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography...
Minds have been made up about John Updike. A typical review will begin by grudgingly acknowledging the brilliance of his ‘style’ – as if Updike’s style were a set of...
As everyone knows, Sherlock Holmes only appeared to plunge into the Reichenbach Falls, locked in a deadly embrace with Professor Moriarty. In fact, using his knowledge of ‘baritsu, or the...
I: Tollund, after 2000 Years I found you smoked in the loam, Leathered by the loop of time. Lithe earthling. Bog-bottled. I turned out the tissues of your paunch To view your last meal. Perhaps...
When The Dunciad in Four Books hit the stands in the autumn of 1743, making The New Dunciad old hat after barely eighteen months, Samuel Richardson grumbled in a letter to his friend and sometime...